I don't care about what little individual bits and pieces of a browser use. It all adds up, and the end result is what matters. I care what a brand new, clean instance of a browser takes up with no web page open... and it shouldn't be anywhere near 200 MB. That's a whopping 20% of the total memory I have, with no web page even open! That's just ridiculous. Think about that for a second: should a web browser even have to take over 100 MB just to display a blank page? I seriously don't think so.

Sure... you could argue, get rid of the extensions, they take up memory. That only shaves off maybe about 50 MB... and 150 MB is still high. And you're still stuck with a browser hogging an unacceptable amount of memory on its own before you even enter a URL.

I don't care about what little individual bits and pieces of a browser use. It all adds up, and the end result is what matters. I care what a brand new, clean instance of a browser takes up with no web page open... and it shouldn't be anywhere near 200 MB. That's a whopping 20% of the total memory I have, with no web page even open! That's just ridiculous. Think about that for a second: should a web browser even have to take over 100 MB just to display a blank page? I seriously don't think so.

Sure... you could argue, get rid of the extensions, they take up memory. That only shaves off maybe about 50 MB... and 150 MB is still high. And you're still stuck with a browser hogging an unacceptable amount of memory on its own before you even enter a URL.

So, again, what was the point of going through all that crap and looking through dozens of smaller values when I only care about the grand total--which any system monitor should return accurately? The end result is that the browser itself shows a very similar "total memory usage," and that's what I care about.

Note: The above was measured on a completely fresh copy of Firefox after completely exiting the previous instance. The only difference compared to my previous tests was that I went to "about:config" immediately after running the browser (which was, again, set to start with a blank page) and before taking any measurements, so they should all be in line.